You remember Kris Kobach, right? Once a Congressional candidate with ties to white supremacists, before that a Justice Department staffer on a since-abandoned racial profiling scheme, after which he bankrupted the Kansas Republican Party, and is lately famous for authoring Arizona’s “show me your papers” law. He’s running for Kansas secretary of state, where he’d regulate state elections. At a recent event organized by the “Patriot movement” (which previously spawned domestic terrorists Timothy McVeigh, and Scott Roeder), Kobach made some rather remarkable claims, not least that:

terrorists are streaming over the United States-Mexico border, armed Mexican cartels have taken over some territory on the U.S. side, and that some Democrats support illegal immigration because they see potential voters. …

“This is a really big security threat,” said Kobach, who is a former Kansas Republican Party chairman and candidate for the GOP nomination for secretary of state. …

Kobach said the issue of stopping illegal immigrants at the border is a matter of national security. In 2005, the Border Patrol captured 3,722 people crossing from Mexico into the United States who were from countries that are considered state sponsors of terrorism, Kobach said. He said that probably represents one-fourth of the total from those countries who entered the United States illegally.

What evidence is there that Cuba, Iran, Sudan, or Syria are sending terrorists to the US via Mexico? Indeed, what evidence is there that any terrorists have entered the country without a visa? None. Lots of immigrants from Cuba enter via Mexico, but those are mostly legal. Immigrants from Cuba or any of the other countries have good reason to flee to the freedom of the United States, and terrorism is hardly the first explanation I’d look for to explain someone wanting to leave Syria, Cuba, Iran, or Sudan. The press report on the event does not indicate any evidence of terrorists crossing the Mexican border.

But this was hardly the biggest slander of the evening. According to the Lawrence Journal-World:

He said some Democrats oppose securing the border because they have calculated that at some point amnesty will be approved, allowing illegal immigrants to become citizens, and then those people will vote for Democrats.

“They want as many voters as possible,” he said.

There’s a simpler explanation. Democrats may just know that anti-immigrant efforts don’t just offend immigrants, but also citizens who immigrated to this country, or whose families did so. Pissing off voters is not good politics, and undermining basic civil liberties is bad policy. One needn’t concoct elaborate conspiracies to explain why Democrats might favor a less punitive approach than Kobach might prefer.

Kobach’s efforts have not just been against illegal immigration, but against immigrants more broadly. Kobach worked to increase scrutiny of documented immigrants from the Middle East, racially profiling travelers to our country. He created a law in Arizona that encourages racial profiling and creates a police state for certain ethnic minorities. These are not simply efforts at “securing the border,” they are attacks on ethnic groups that Kobach doesn’t like.

If Kobach knew what he was talking about, he’d know that Democrats have supported policies that would cut back on illegal border crossings as part of comprehensive reforms that also address the people currently in the country without proper documentation. The suggestion that Democrats don’t want to secure the border is nonsense, as is his explanation for why people disagree with his batshit policies.

Comments

While a lot of them claim to be simply opposed to the illegal immigration, FAIR, the biggest anti-immigration organization, is opposed to legal immigration as well. They put that under the cover of “maintaining population numbers.” The organization is nothing but racist bigotry, and Kobach is tied right into them.

Kobach also told a Tea Party in the Flint Hills a few months back that the 17th Amendment was the first of three serious turning points in the erosion of state’s rights. While that might technically be true, I can’t really understand how selection of US Senators by a vote of the people instead of state governments is the beginning of the end of state’s rights or, yanno, a bad thing.

All Kobach said was that having an unsecured border was a threat, not that terrorists have historically used that route to get into the country. On the morning of September 11th, terrorists had no history of crashing planes into buildings. That didn’t mean that letting terrorists onto airplanes wasn’t a threat.

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About TfK

Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at the National Center for Science Education. He is formerly a doctoral candidate at the University of Kansas, in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. When not battling creationists or modeling species ranges, he writes about developments in progressive politics and the sciences.

The opinions expressed here are his own, do not reflect the official position of NCSE. Indeed, older posts may no longer reflect his own official position.